Having left Politico beaten and bloodied on the canvas, let me now turn my attention to The Hill.

The Hill is an equally left-wing MSM organ, if slightly better written and reported. In yesterday’s paper, The Hill eagerly declared:

GOP strategist Karl Rove predicted Saturday that deploying National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities, over the objections of their respective states’ governors, will ultimately be a losing issue for President Trump.  In an interview on Fox News’s “The Journal Editorial Report,” Rove pointed to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showing 58 percent of U.S. adults say the president should only deploy troops to areas with external threats — a view held by 72 percent of Democrats, 51 percent of Republicans and 53 percent who identify as “other."

The subtext of their article is obvious – The Hill is telling its fellow Democrats to be in good cheer because GOP strategist Karl Rove is on their side on this issue, and warning Republicans that they should cave on this issue immediately, before it is too late.

Now, a lot depends on what one thinks of Karl Rove, the political strategist behind President George W. Bush’s political career. President Trump — and many MAGA Republicans — don’t like him, and don’t think he is politically astute. Meanwhile, the left-wing Democrats who used to hate him as a “diabolical political genius” have developed a “strange new respect” for his willingness to challenge Trump while still (sometimes) crediting him as a “genius” (when not making fun of him for his actions during the Romney campaign). 

Which is amusing to me, as I am old enough to remember the day when CNN cameras were crowded around the Bush White House to wait for the imminent perp march in handcuffs by the criminal, Karl Rove. CNN even had a running time counter. (They eventually pulled the feed when nothing happened.) I don’t remember the specific scandal, but I do remember that some Democrat staffers in the U.S. Senate (where I was then working) assured me that Rove was involved in something that was “worse than Watergate” and Rove’s imprisonment was absolutely a requirement to save democracy from his boss, “Bushitler.”   

I have a more nuanced view of Rove. At his peak, he was probably a better-than-average political strategist, but he did make mistakes and was never a genius. And today, I believe Rove is no longer at his peak, and his specific argument that President Trump will be harmed politically if he uses the National Guard to crack down on crime is just completely wrong.

In fact, I am surprised that Rove would even make this argument. In 1969, Kevin Phillips wrote “The Emerging Republican Majority.” Phillips’ book documented how the GOP was becoming the presidential majority party by pushing certain salient issues. One of those issues was the fight against crime. Phillips showed that because the Democrats – who then, as now, controlled the major cities – had instituted soft-on-crime policies, the cities were experiencing a major crime wave. He wrote that this was a huge opening for Republicans to win over Democrat voters, especially white working-class voters.

And this is exactly what happened. From 1968 through 1992, the Republicans had an electoral “lock” over the presidency – except in 1976 under very unusual circumstances – because the Democrats refused to moderate on policies like crime. This lock ended in 1992 only when Bill Clinton won by portraying himself as a moderate who wasn’t soft on crime and largely held to these policies during his years in office.  

Kevin Phillips’ book is now part of the established conventional wisdom of American political history. I would have expected Karl Rove to know of Phillips’ thesis, and to accept it himself, since I know political consultant Lee Atwater firmly believed in it, and I know that Karl Rove knew and patterned himself after Atwater.

After 2000, especially under Joe Biden, successive Democrat leaders reverted to their original programming and allowed their subservient state and local Democrats to reinstitute soft-on-crime policies. Leading, once again, to a surge in crime in the cities, which is only partially hidden by Democrat manipulation of the official statistics. Also, the Democrats allowed massive numbers of illegal aliens into the nation, with many of them also having serious criminal records, who have gone on to commit spectacularly violent acts. Further, the Democrats empowered the leftist antifa goon squads who are committing terrorism in these cities to protect the illegals and other criminals, and the local Democrats are ordering their police to stand down from policing, making it hard to tamp down on the chaos.

SEE ALSO: Big Surprise: Baltimore Is Locking Up Crooks, and Crime Rates Are Dropping

New Poll Being Silenced by Media Blows Up Democrats' Narratives

So, based on American political history alone, Karl Rove’s argument doesn’t strike me as particularly credible.

Even worse, Rove relies on a Reuters poll as his main evidence. But Reuters is a poor pollster with a 5.1 point bias which always favors the Democrats and the left.  

I prefer to focus on the RCP average, which has shown to have only a slight two-point advantage for the Democrat/left-wing side. Unfortunately, there is no RCP average for the specific question Reuters asked, but there are averages on immigration and on crime, which together cover much of the same territory. The former shows Trump at 46.5 percent approval to 50.3 percent disapproval. The latter shows Trump at 47.7 percent approval to 48.6 percent disapproval. Both of which are better – the crime one much better – than his overall average, which is 45.3 percent approval to 52 percent disapproval. And all of these averages are right where the approval number has been since May, which doesn’t demonstrate any real loss in support for his more recent calls to use the National Guard. 

Meaning, the current polling does not seem to support Karl Rove’s argument, either.

Finally, it is important to remember that a poll or a poll average is just a snapshot in time, and that these numbers could change after a campaign. The MSM/Democrats can be expected to continue to downplay the crime wave and the terrorism in the cities and to continue to paint President Trump’s actions as an unconstitutional use of the military to set up/reinforce his “Hitlerian dictatorship.”  

In other words, the Democrats will say Trump is up to his usual "deviltry." Is that going to be an effective argument? Has it worked for them before?  

No. Not at all.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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